10 Reasons Not to be a Doctor

1. Don’t become a doctor if you are in it for the money.
Money is the biggest factor that leads people to pursue the field of medicine. Whenever a girl looks for a guy to go out with, a physician is whom she seeks most of the time. Money is power; and people have this false notion that being doctor will equal money which will further equal happiness. Money should not be the driving factor if you want to be a physician. If you tell the medical school you want to be a doctor because you want to be rich, they’ll just slap you and kick you out. No they won’t slap you but they will reject you without question.

2. Don’t become a doctor if you are lazy.
Any doctor or any student doctor will tell you that it takes a lot of dedication to be a physician. Those who are lazy will not be able to cope with the strenuous workload that medical schools demand. In my undergrad years I was laid back; however, when it comes to getting something done with full focus I would do it without any distractions. In medical school I had to turn up the notch on my study habits to keep up with the amount of materials my instructors throw at me.

3. Don’t become a doctor if you are not discipline in studying.
This was a problem in undergrad for me. I can stay still and focus on many things but when it comes to studying it was hard. I forced myself to stay seated and focused and after a while I got used to it. It takes time to get into the study phase; and when I started medical school it took me about 3 months to fully change my study habits. Now, I study practically every single day.

4. Don’t become a doctor if you study only by memorizing.
They’ll tell you that med school is all about memorizing. The answer is no, it’s about understanding medical concepts. The biggest topic to understand is Physiology and it deals with little memorization with more focus on understanding how things work in the body on cellular level.

5. Don’t become a doctor if you hate seeing blood.
My dad is an engineer and he told me he didn’t want to be a doctor because he wants to stay away from blood. A lot of my peers in undergrad had the same reason to choose a field other than medicine. To me blood is blood as long as it’s not from a virus-infected person. If the sight of blood scares you then I suggest you avoid medicine because you will have to use needles and blood will be in your view.

6. Don’t become a doctor if you have to have 8 hours of sleep every night.
Majority of the time a medical student will get a maximum of 5 hours of sleep. One of the hardest thing about medical school is not the studying part, but sacrificing the sleep.

7. Don’t become a doctor if you are not a people person.
If you are just book smart and you hate people then you may reconsider studying medicine. Doctors have contact with patients all the time whether it’s by phone or by person. In clinical clerkship as a student doctor you will be exposed to all sorts of patients from various backgrounds and if you can’t get along with different people then look elsewhere for a career.  And if you are a racist, you definately should not be a doctor beause you have to treat a person regardless of the person's age, sex, language, skin color, origin, ethnicity, legal status, sex orientation; you have to do it because it's the law.

8. Don’t become a doctor if cannot bend your ego.
In rotations if a nurse says you’re wrong then you’re wrong regardless of if you really are wrong. Nurses have more experiences and you’re fresh out of medical school without ay clinical experiences so it’s better to lower your ego and listen to the nurses because you’re not a full doctor yet.

9. Don’t become a doctor if you are not a team player.
In medical school students help each other. Medical schools promote peer-to-peer help and they do their best to enforce it. For example, the grading system in Yale and other medical schools abandoned the numeral and letter grading system to eliminate competition in classes. Instead, they introduced the pass/fail system which eliminates the cutthroat ways the medical students practice among each other to get a top place in their classes.

10. Don’t become a doctor if you can’t suffer.
An important question you should ask yourself before becoming a doctor is, can you suffer physically, mentally, or emotionally? I am in Bonaire, I struggle from time to time every week walking in the hot sun sweating and dehydrating. In America, medical students struggle like me in eating habits; there are times when I can’t even cook so I have to eat Ramen Noodles or a can of beans which are not satisfying. I eat it because I’m going against time, time that I can use to study.